The waymark coordinates are located at the Corsicana State Home historical marker at State Home Cemetery Park next door.
There's a certain Jekyll and Hyde feeling about this place. If you were here during the Orphan Home years from 1887 to the late 1970s, your experience was completely different from those children who arrived here in 1983, when the Corsicana State Home was turned over to the Texas Youth Commission and repurposed as a juvenile prison for dangerously mentally ill boys who had committed crimes.
In 2013, the State Legislature, tired of decades of horrifying stories of abuse and maltreatment by staff at the Corsicana facility, finally ordered the Corsicana State Home closed. In 2022 the campus is fenced off and offered for sale. The Texas Tribune has the details in their story "Closing Corsicana: Lessons From a Shuttered Youth Detention Center"
Memories of happier, more beneficial days can be found next door at the State Home Cemetery Park, where 60 orphans are buried next to the place that they called home. This park is a monument to and a memorial of the days when placement at the State Orphan Home was a benevolent lifeline for children and the impoverished families who could no longer care for them. It's a peaceful, positive place.
The state historical marker reads as follows:
"CORSICNANA STATE HOME
Created by the 20th Legislature in 1887, the State Orphan Asylum originally provided care for orphans under age 14. State officials located the institution in Corsicana after local citizens donated over 200 acres at this site. The first students arrived in 1889, and by 1890 enrollment totaled 54. Classes met in the chapel before a school building was erected in 1889. By 1897 the institution had an independent school district.
Renamed State Orphan Home before 1899, the facility housed about 400 students in 1900. Here they received academic and vocational instruction. The campus once had extensive farmlands to supply food and provide agricultural training for students. Physical facilities were enlarged as enrollment increased. During the Depression of the 1930s, residents numbered over 800.
The campus school was phased out at the end of the 1955-56 academic year, and students transferred to Corsicana public schools. In 1957 the home was placed under jurisdiction of the Texas Youth Council and was renamed Corsicana State Home.
Thousands of children have benefited from the care and schooling provided by the home. Prominent former students include Robert W. Calvert, Texas Supreme Court Associate Justice, 1950-61, and Chief Justice, 1961-72.
(1977)"
From the Handbook of Texas Online: (
visit link)
"CORSICANA STATE HOME.Corsicana State Home, formerly the State Orphans' Home, was established in 1887 by an act of the Twelfth Legislature to support, educate, and care for orphan or dependent children. It opened on July 15, 1889, and housed fifty-four children the first year. In 1932 the home reached a peak enrollment of 890. During the 1940s the enrollment began to decline, and by 1945 the facility housed only 443 children. By 1948 the orphanage, located three miles west of the Corsicana business district, had twenty-one brick structures and a number of small frame cottages, barns, and outbuildings on 417 acres. In its early years the home operated its own independent school district with a grade school, junior high, and high school. In addition to academic subjects the school offered courses in various vocational fields, including cosmetology, mechanics, printing, agriculture, home economics, and business. Until the 1960s the institution also operated its own farms, dairy, creamery, laundry, cannery, store, power plant, bakery, kitchen, and hospital. Older children worked part-time in these operations and thus received practical training. In 1957 the institution was renamed Corsicana State Home. The home was integrated in the mid-1960s and is now operated under the administration of the Texas Youth Commission. After World War II the school was closed down, and children from the home began to attend the Corsicana public schools. In 1989 the institution served sixty-six children."
In 2016 the Corsicana Daily Sun published an article about a reunion of the former residents of the first iteration of the Corsicana State Orphan's Home (1887-1982): (
visit link)
Corsicana State Home Reunion not just about renewing connections
By Ann Marett Special to the Daily Sun Jun 5, 2016
When the Corsicana State Home closed in 1982, no one knew that the city would still be realizing economic gain 34 years later. That gain comes in the form of the Annual State Orphans’ Home Alumni Association homecoming held the second weekend every June.
Approximately 200 people come to Corsicana every summer to reunite with friends they simply consider their family. This year’s reunion is June 10-12, according to Association Board President Lynn Emery Taylor of Corsicana. More than 40 rooms have been booked at a local hotel.
Beverly and Wayne Stroud make the drive from Las Vegas, Nevada each year. Beverly, an artist specializing in oils, has painted seven scenes of life at the State Home over the years. She frames these 16 x 20-inch works of original art and donates them to the live auction held during the reunion banquet Saturday evening. Proceeds from that auction go toward scholarships for descendants of the Corsicana State Home.
Wayne Stroud was born in Blum, Texas in 1937 and lived in the Corsicana State Home from 1943 until 1957. He had been placed there with his two older sisters, Joan and Peggy Stroud. Beverly and Wayne stop in Dallas to visit Joan and her husband of 60 years, Riley Rodgers. Rodgers also grew up in the State Home where he met Joan. Then the two couples travel to Bluff Dale, Texas, to visit sister Peggy before coming to Corsicana for the weekend.
Beverly and Wayne, married since 1958, come to the reunions because “we just love everybody and their stories,” she said. “This is really our family and always will be.”
Beverly Stroud will be honored at the banquet this year for her contributions to the Alumni Association, along with others from around the state: Du’Ane Yancy of Corsicana, Ruth Cisneros of Houston, Danny Steele of Ben Wheeler, Lamar Moon of Rosenberg and Fern and Paulette Kerr Pelletier of Argyle.
Another economic benefit to the city comes in the form of the Corsicana State Orphans’ Home Cemetery Beautification Project.
Some of the thousands of children housed at the State Home died of illness while living there and are buried in a cemetery on campus. Since early last year, Board President Taylor worked with staff from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department, which owns the campus, and with Texas State Sen. Brian Birdwell and State Rep. Byron Cook to have the cemetery and some surrounding land deeded to the State Orphans’ Home Association, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
That work came to fruition when Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas Senate Bill 2054 into law in June 2015. Earlier this year the deed to the land was turned over to the Alumni Association.
The Cemetery Beautification project is well underway with drainage work already complete, as well as a fence built and an artist rendering which calls for 17 trees, a brick walkway inscribed with the names of former residents of the State Home, and a permanent marker telling the story of the children buried there.
Former residents will have an opportunity to “buy a tree” at the cemetery park to honor a loved one. A tree with a memorial plaque will sell for $200 at the banquet Saturday night.
“Although the Association members have already donated in excess of $32,000 to fund this project, it’s extremely important we continue to raise money to put in some form of a Trust to ensure maintenance of the cemetery long after we all are gone,” said Taylor. “We will discuss those plans throughout the weekend.”
Reunion festivities kick off Saturday morning at the Lake Halbert Pavilion and include lunch and a Memorial Service to honor former residents. Well-known resident Woody Harry, who died earlier this year, will be remembered by his children as well as about 20 of his classmates from the Corsicana High School Class of 1960."